The Python Project

by Victor Canning

  ‘Check the Magarba Garage too. I think you’ll find that Freeman or Dawson hired a car there some time in the last twelve days.’ I stood up. ‘And let’s be as frank as we can with one another. Okay, there are lots of things you don’t want to tell me. Fine, if that’s how you feel it must be. But it hardly is the way to encourage cooperation from me—that’s if there’s anything I could do to help.’

  ‘If I fancy you can help me I’ll get in touch with you. But please understand that I do not wish you to encroach on what is now purely a police matter.’

  Encroach. It was a good word. The trouble was that I had encroached already. And it was a good feeling. My late-night and early-morning lassitude was gone. La Piroletta had been the final dose of tonic to brighten the whites of my eyes. But more than health now I could hear distantly the rattle of a cash register and that, if you’ve got your health and the kind of fluctuating bank balance I enjoy, is music played by the oldest siren in the world. He didn’t know it, of course, but standing there looking down at him, I’d just been presented with a lead which, the moment I could check it, might prove that Bill Dawson was really the number one, gold-plated nigger in this wood-pile. Little things tip a man’s destiny. And this one was a half-folded newspaper that lay neatly to one side of his desk. Later, I learned that it was the Sunday Ghibli, a weekly English-language newspaper published in Tripoli. All I was concerned with was the headline. There were going to be times soon when I could have wished I had never seen it.

  ‘So long as I keep out of your hair, that’s all right?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And I can stay here as long as I like?’

  ‘I don’t imagine, Mr Carver—from the information I have about you—that you will want to stay at your own expense once Mrs Stankowski terminates your assignment.’

  I didn’t answer.

  He said, ‘The police car will drive you to your hotel. As a matter of fact it is very close to the British Embassy should you want to go and see them.’

  He stood up and I was surprised to see how short he was.

  I said, ‘Why was I picked up on the road in from the airport? All of this could have waited until tomorrow.’

  He shook his head. ‘It seemed to me a good thing to have it over and done with. And again I thought it might embarrass you to have a police car call for you at your hotel.’

  It was weak and he knew that I knew it. A police car was going to take me back to the hotel anyway. And when the police of any country start to worry about embarrassing people like me, then it was a safe bet that the real worry in their minds was much deeper and directed elsewhere.

  *

  The Del Mehari Hotel was on the sea front to the east of the town. It was a low Moorish-style building mostly on one floor, with all the rooms set around a central hall and a couple of inner courtyards.

  I took a short stroll before breakfast towards the town. Palm trees lined the long esplanade. The wide curve of the harbour was a crinkly, breeze-freshened blue. Smug-fronted Mercedes and chromium-grinning American cars made pleasant tyre noises over the tarmac. A couple of blanket-wrapped Arabs slept in a sea-front embrasure, and groups of black-dressed Arab women shuffled along in the breeze, returning from their early morning charing jobs in the government offices. The Mediterranean sky was studded with little tufts of cotton-wool cloud. Way ahead of me was the Harbour Castle and the huddle of the old Arab town. But at this end all the signals were set to GO, hell-bent into the last half of the twentieth century on the crest of the Libyan oil boom. Office and apartment blocks were reaching up to dwarf the mosques and muezzin towers, and the faithful were called to pray to Allah these days over a Tannoy system. It was about as exotic as Brighton and you could find the same things in the shops and bars but at rather higher prices. A flight of jets from the Wheelus Air Base whined through the air leaving curving vapour trails behind them. It was the same old world, distance annihilated, all services piped in, ready at the flick of a finger, and not a single real problem that had plagued the world since homo sapiens first planted his ugly feet on it an inch nearer being solved. Only hope can sustain a dismal record like that. Or stupidity.

  I went back and had eggs and bacon and fresh rolls and coffee, and got the waiter to bring me a cable form. To Mrs Stankowski I sent the message:

  Presume you have official information death brother. Cable instructions.

  Knowing the efficiency of the British Post Office service, I was ready to bet that they would deliver it as a greetings telegram with a border of fluffy rabbits, song birds and nosegays.

  During my second cup of coffee Wilkins and Olaf appeared. I’d met Olaf before, but he always came as a shock to me. He seemed to have put on another two inches everywhere. His pale-blue eyes sparkled with health so that I knew the tummy trouble was gone, his pale, fair hair was ruffled from the wind, and one of his great hands grabbed mine and pumped away as though he were clearing the bilges to keep the ship from sinking. He sat down and the chair just held under his weight, and he had to sit sideways because his knees would not go under the table comfortably.

  ‘Mr Carver—you mess up our holiday. Not the first time, eh?’ He grinned and the huge brown face went into a landslide of happy wrinkles.

  ‘How’s the stomach?’

  ‘Fine. It was temporary. Some mussels we have at an Italian restaurant. Shellfish in the Mediterranean is always suspect. I should know but I never learn. You think Hilda looks well?’

  Hilda, though God knows I could never think of her as anything but Wilkins, looked well, but embarrassed at the attention directed to her. She smiled at Olaf, then frowned at me, put up a hand and touched her rust-coloured hair, and said, ‘What happened with the police?’

  ‘Freeman is dead,’ I said. ‘They showed me his body. Fished out of the drink. So far as I am concerned it is the end of the matter. At least, almost.’

  ‘We can go back to Cairo?’ Olaf lit an Egyptian cigarette and began to fumigate the dining room.

  ‘When a couple of small points are cleared up. Would you have any contacts with the harbour or shipping people here?’

  Olaf nodded. ‘Yes. Any port on the Med or the Red Sea, I know someone.’

  ‘Good—there’s a certain Leon Pelegrina who owns a steam yacht called La Sunata. I’d quite like to know what the movements of that boat have been lately. Say, in the last three weeks. Can do?’

  ‘Of course.’ He rose to his feet, and grabbed the table from going over. ‘I go down there now. Hilda, I come back for you soon.’

  He reached across for her hand, kissed it and was gone. ‘Charming,’ I said. ‘He’s mad about you. When you set up house see you get good, solid teak furniture and screw it to the floor.’

  ‘He’s a good kind man.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. And you’re lucky—he comes in the king size.’

  ‘Why are you interested in this steam yacht if the matter is finished?’

  ‘I like to tie up the loose ends. But don’t worry about going back to Cairo. You’ll get there. But first I’d like you this morning to go into town and send a cable to a Miss Jane Judd at the Mountjoy Hotel in Dorset Square. Sign it in my name and ask for a reply Post Restante here.’

  ‘I could do it from the hotel.’

  ‘I know you could, but anything you send from there is probably handed first to the police.’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘I said I was just tying up loose ends. I am. Just say—Cable if M.F. has abdominal scar left-hand side.’

  ‘I presume this body had?’

  ‘Yes. It’s about the only thing left for identification except the teeth.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to do this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Freeman is dead. Olaf and I want to go to Cairo. And you won’t ever leave well alone. The police out here are very touchy about interference.’

  ‘They are everywhere. Touchiness is essential. Even if you’re the right height you can’t
get into the police without it. And there’s something else.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. You’ve got that look. What is it this time? Some woman—or just money?’

  ‘Both. And in addition, a man.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘Bill Dawson. Captain Asab, whom I saw at Police Headquarters, was remarkably uninterested in Dawson. No policeman can be remarkably uninterested in a man who was probably playing golf with Freeman a day or so before he was shot through the head.’

  ‘Shot?’

  ‘Didn’t I mention that?’

  She looked at me with steady blue eyes and shook her head slowly, pursing her lips. Next to Olaf, but a long way behind, I was her concern. I hoped that she wasn’t going to overdo it.

  ‘You have no intention of giving up this case, have you?’

  ‘I don’t like loose ends. I’ll give it up when it’s all tidy. Look at this.’

  I handed over to her a copy of the Sunday Ghibli which I had found in the hotel lounge.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Read the headline.’

  She read it. Looked at me, then read it again. I lit a cigarette.

  She said, ‘It’s a common enough name.’

  ‘Sure. Like Smith, Brown and Jones.’

  She sniffed. ‘I think you should go back to London.’

  I shook my head. ‘Think about Bill Dawson. William Dawson. A common enough name. Something about that keeps niggling in my mind. You could check it.’

  ‘A call to the British Embassy would confirm it.’

  T don’t want it confirmed officially yet. I just want to know privately. I thought you’d like to do it.’

  ‘What I’d like to do is to go to Cairo, and know you were back in London. At least there your mercenary instincts are reasonably limited.’ She tapped the paper. ‘If what I’m thinking you’re thinking is so, your plain duty would be to tell all you know to the authorities.’

  ‘You remember the three times in the last eight years that I’ve done that? It did nothing for my reputation, my pocket or my comfort. Will you check it for me? I don’t want to poke around. But there’s a British Reading Room here. You’ll probably find it full of dead-beat Libyans having a quiet snooze, but there’s sure to be some gabby type in charge of the out-of-date newspapers and magazines. Turn on the charm.’

  ‘There could be thousands of Dawsons.’

  ‘That’s it. And some of ’em get to the top. By the way, do you still remember our private code?’

  ‘Now listen, Mr Carver!’

  ‘All right, all right. . . I raised a placatory hand, my left through years of practice because you always want the right free in case it doesn’t work.

  Wilkins stood up and gathered herself together. She could do it better than anyone I knew. The temperature dropped and from inside the glacier she said, ‘I’ll do this and then Olaf and I are going back. When I joined you, you know it was agreed that I should not have to do field work.’

  ‘You make it sound as though I’m running a cotton plantation.’

  ‘You need,’ she said, ‘your head examined. And I wish I knew this time what you were after. I don’t believe it’s money, because you’ve got plenty at the moment.’

  ‘A woman, perhaps.’

  ‘No, because you would have been talking about her already and have that silly, self-satisfied look on your face.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I think you’re just doing it for the hell of it. For excitement. In the same way that teenagers take blue pills and eventually find themselves hooked on heroin. If you can’t get a kick out of chasing money or a woman, then you find something else to chase.’

  I said, ‘That’s a very attractive straw hat you’ve got. The ribbon matches your eyes. And you are looking well.’

  She didn’t say ‘pig’, but she swept out.

  *

  From the Del Mehari to the British Embassy was about two or three hundred yards along the sea front towards the town. After the first fifty yards I realized that Captain Asab had put a tail on me. He was a young man in a leather jacket and tight black trousers, open-necked white shirt and a very worn round astrakhan hat. He was talking to the hotel gardener who was watering the gravel of the hotel forecourt when I came out. He drifted after me down the road and I checked him by going twice round the block in which the Embassy stood. He went round conscientiously after me and then looked a bit foolish as I stood at the foot of the Embassy steps waiting for him to come by. When he came up to me, I said, ‘Is the man in the black Simca your friend?’

  He looked blankly at me.

  I nodded across the road. A black Simca saloon was just parking across the way.

  ‘Your friend?’ I queried him.

  ‘No comprendo, signore,’ he said.

  ‘Save it,’ I said. ‘I shall be in here for a while, then you can give me a lift down to the Uaddan. Captain Asab won’t mind.’

  He gave a shy little grin, then dry-washed his chin with one hand, and said, ‘The signore is talking in riddles.’ He ducked his head at me and moved on. I watched him go, thinking that Captain Asab must be very hard up for trained men. Either that, or he was putting a novice on to me for the experience, knowing that I wouldn’t mind.

  In the Embassy hallway there was a porter in a serge suit and red fez who wanted me to fill out a memo in triplicate stating the nature of my business. Instead I wrote—Martin Freeman and William Dawson—on the back of one of my cards and handed it to him, saying, ‘Ask the Ambassador if he can spare five minutes.’

  He looked shocked and disappeared. I sat down and watched a girl in a white blouse and check skirt arranging a bowl of flowers on a stand further down the hall. She arranged them nicely, showing a lot of leg, one of which had a ladder in its nylon. A telephone rang twice somewhere. An Air Force officer came down the stairway and the girl moved around in her arranging so that he could see the laddered nylon. She was wasting her time. He went by her and by me and out with a glazed look in his eye as though he had just been dismissed from the service.

  Five minutes later I was in a little room on the first floor talking to a secretary who had been designated to deal with me in lieu of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. There was a silver-framed photograph of a woman and two nice boys on his desk, all of them smiling. His wife and children, I presumed. It was a pity he wasn’t smiling too. It spoilt the family atmosphere. He looked worried and cautious and he had the right face for it. It was clear too that he had no time for me. I was in the wrong profession and certainly wasn’t wearing the right tie. His was Old Marlburian; mine was a green number with red dots on it and the silk a little frayed on the knot. Wilkins that morning had found time to give it a disapproving stare. Anxiety and caution—to them in other people I am as sensitive as a sea anemone sensing the turn of the tide.

  I said, ‘I just wanted to check with you whether you had had any instructions from my client about the disposal of her brother’s body? Captain Asab of the police here has told me that you have already informed her of the tragedy.’

  ‘No instructions have so far been received.’

  ‘Will you let me know when you do receive them? I’m at the Del Mehari Hotel up the road.’

  ‘Certainly.’ He raised his bottom two inches from his chair. He couldn’t wait to get rid of me.

  ‘Dreadful thing,’ I said. ‘Shot through the head and then dumped in the drink. Not that he didn’t have something like that coming to him by all accounts. Still—de mortuis nil nisi bonum.’

  The tag and its sentiment didn’t impress him beyond making him lower his bottom to the seat.

  ‘I think, Mr Carver, you can safely leave everything in our hands—in co-operation with the Libyan police, that is.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Would you have any idea which way the sea current sets along this coast at this time of the year? East to west or the other way round?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

&n
bsp; He was beginning to lift again but I stalled him.

  ‘And what about this Bill Dawson he was last seen with?’

  ‘How did you know—’

  He broke off, not because the telephone had begun to ring on his desk, but because for a moment he had assumed that I knew something I wasn’t presumed to know, and then had decided that I was probably making some kind of inspired guess. I was, of course. In fact, for inspired guessing I’m in the Olympic class. How otherwise would I make money and eat?

  He picked up the phone and answered it. I sat there and listened. His eyes kept flickering towards me as he said ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’, and then once ‘Would you mind repeating that?’ It was a classical example of a guarded conversation and his eyes on me gave away the fact that whatever was being said to him he connected in some way with me.

  He wrote something on a memo pad with a pencil, put the phone down, tore off the memo page and stood up.

  ‘Would you please excuse me a moment?’

  I nodded graciously. Why not—he was on the Queen’s business. I was just on my own, but I had more than an inkling even then that the two were going to be mixed. He went out of the room, through a door behind his desk. As it closed I reached over and tore off the next page of the memo block. He had a good heavy hand with a pencil when he wrote. I didn’t bother then to try and decipher the markings that had come through to the lower leaf. When he came back the memo page was neatly folded in my pocket.

  I said, ‘You were going to tell me something about this Bill Dawson who was with Freeman sometime shortly before his death.’ Stiffly, he said, ‘I wasn’t aware that I was. We know nothing of any Dawson who might have been connected with Mr Freeman.’ He rose smartly, no stalling him this time, but he put a patently false note of co-operation into his voice to get me eased out of the room. ‘Be assured, Mr Carver—that so long as you represent Mrs Stankowski’s interests out here we shall keep you informed—so far as police protocol will allow—of all developments. The death, possible murder, indeed, of a British subject is, of course, a matter of great concern to us and the local authorities.’